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He wouldn’t have to see his reflection if he’d gone transparent.
Unfortunately, Keeper had taken one of his vacations and wasn’t around. He left Kit in good company: the NYC Public Library. The place was booming with information, and the city was alive 24 hours a day, seven days per week. He would be a dutiful pupil, harbinger of justice; researching to his heart’s content amidst a sea of resources. At least, that had been the plan.
(Till he'd walked out into the open sunlight, the rays hitting his skin full-force. His pupils contracting to the onslaught of light. His balance, off kilter from lack of use. And the mass of faces, dear God, their faces: simultaneously descript yet without detail. No one was staring at him, yet everyone was. A girl's kitsch pink purse in hand, dangled, just a commuter but-- he was lost to her form. Distracted. The pulpy, swollen eyes of fish lying in his gran'pa's fishing bucket.
---wrong place!
---wrong time!
They bit the bait and were gone, amidst swirls.)
He shivered.
Kit hadn’t left the confines of the bathroom stall for a few hours now. He was ashamed to admit that his purpose had left him. His eyes were wet, though since when he couldn’t say. Certainly he never cried back in Eternity. He never spared a thought for himself, he avoided compliments like the Black Plague of 1350, he crammed his head into books; he sought out ways to help the poor mortals of Earth with his divine powers. He was Kid Eternity - not Kit Freeman, the youth that had died prematurely.
He was shaking.
He huffed, rubbing his forehead in an attempt to stunt the oncoming migraine. Bathroom stalls looked different than they did 25 years ago. The doors were raised higher, so that one might almost poke their head to spy on one’s privacy. Unwanted spies.
Kid, it seemed, was getting paranoid. It was easier to forget who he was when he was busied with superhero work. Kit never read those comic books when he was little, and thought them childish (though Freddy cherished such trite tales of action). The culture was starting to creep upon America. Point being: he’d never thought of himself in such terms, not until he’d joined forces with the Marvels.
They were loved, cherished! Known! For comparison, "Kid Eternity" had stopped at nothing in covering up all traces of his EXISTENCE.
(It was Chanukah, and he was seven years old again. The date, however, was of no importance to little Christopher Freeman. At this stage in life, he was an innocent: neither the religious nor historical implications fell upon him, that of Alexander's march into Jerusalem, nor of his parents' own faith. No, instead-- perfectly in place, not displaced, from his own time-- he played like any other boy. Made snow angels. Burrowed into an igloo he'd built with Freddy, trapping the latter outside of it. Freddy yelled! But Kit took purchase in the feel of the cold ice upon his back, bare.
His brother ran back to his father's side, that of David Freeman: a good man, moral, with hands forged to protect and a wife whose laugh could break Winter's silence. Rebecca smiled at her sons' antics, but Kit wasn't there to live it. The smell of Miss Dior's perfume-- who's Dior, Kit would ask, and his mom would simply laugh--also of her breath, fresh from mints; of her firm firm touch, sure hands. Warm from having lovingly folded his turtleneck sweaters atop their flat top heater. Just of.
"Where's your brother, Freddy?")
It had been hard for Kit to assimilate into a family unit. He'd kept a tight lip on the secret of his existence for a reason: at first, not to scare his sibling with a brother 'back from the dead' (as far as Freddy had known, Christopher was eight feet in the earth), a haunting reminder of his pre-superhero life. Pre-Nazi…
(What if Freddy’s mind had formed an implicit association between his brother’s death, and his own crippling? – Kit would keep himself locked, stowed away, silent to eternity if need be, than subject Freddy to psychological distress. The world needed Junior on active duty, free from trauma.)
And it had been hard on Freddy to interact with his absentee brother. Kit had returned, in body but not in mind: in his thoughts, he was still soaring through the skies, a scientific force of nature, methodologically bringing villains to an end. He was unstoppable.
* * *
“You’re a workaholic, Kid. I don’t know how you’ll adapt to retired living once this gig is up in 50 more years.”
Point-blank: “That means nothing to me.”
Keeper scratched his head. “Well, I’m worried for you.”
“And I’m not your child.”
“By Jove, like I didn’t know that. I’ve seen you worm your way out of Eternity’s bureaucracy, you file your plea for renewed nonexistence annually like any responsible dead man– sure, we could talk about your cutting-edge crime fighting skills. How you’ve held up everything of your part of the bargain and then some; done more than what was expected of you. Eternity’s no worse with you around.”
“You’re rambling as usual!”
“Hold your horses for a second, I’m trying to say something.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. Hey, is that idiom period appropriate?”
“We didn’t ride dinosaurs back in my day, son. Horses existed when I was walking the fields. Granted, they were just being domesticated… Remind me to take you back then, when the third cousin twice-removed of my late great-great-great-great—you get the point, grandfather, climbed humanity’s first horse: BAREBACK.”
Kid narrowed his eyes. His guardian’s bloodline was starting to sound more confusing than that of Cleopatra’s. Minus the incest, he hoped.
“But you’re not about to change the subject on me,” his guardian went on in a somber tone. At that, Kid Eternity just dug his hands into his pockets; ever the picture of a child about to get scolded.
Yet Keeper was light.
“Kit, I think you need a break.”
And when he noted the boy’s rigid posture, he kept on: “I’ve noticed how tense you’ve been lately. Picking more fights than usual. What sort of lunatic challenges Vasily Zaystev to a shoot-off with only a finger gun? That was uncalled for even for you!”
“He’s a renowned Soviet sniper, not some Billy the Kid!”
Kid was finding it exceedingly hard to justify his actions.
“So I got my facts a little mixed up.”
“Practically flirted with an early second death, more like.” Keep was intangible, but Kit imagined his eyes were rolling around in the third-dimension. Spiralling.
“He wouldn’t share his vodka with me,”
“And don’t look at me like that. You know there’s no drinking age in Eternity. Figured that out when Anne Frank invited me over to reminisce about The Axis Powers on my first day home.”
“Why didn’t you call a brewer? I don’t buy any of these excuses because I know you personally know the name of the man that coined that term.”
His conversational partner threw his hands up into the air in exasperation. “Get to the point? I don’t flirt, by the way.” Not after that last time. He'd learned a thing or two about courting girls with race horses.
Keeper sighed. This conversation was dragging on, and arguing with the kid was like pulling a stubborn mule.
“All I’m saying is that you haven’t been characteristically yourself for a few months on. Since you reunited with your brother, I’d say.”
“I don’t know what being ‘characteristically myself’ is.”
Leaving Mr. Keeper to ponder his statement, Kit punched a hole through the clouds and descended to lovely Earth down yonder. If he heard his guardian’s protests, he turned a deaf ear and ignored them. Kid Eternity considered it an act of kindness. Keeper, truly, didn’t enjoy listening to his ghost ward’s rhetoric—and the little hero had more pressing matters to attend, to supervise, in the land of the living.